Policy creation of civic education curricula in Estonia and Finland

The goal of the article is to understand how the process of civic education policy creation is governed in Estonia and Finland. Even though civic education is a wider concept, it is primarily understood as formal education taking place in school via civic education lessons (Campbell, 2019). Within the scope of this article, governance is composed of the actors participating in the process of setting the goals for the civic education on a national level participating in different forums or arenas within the process. The examples of that may be various ministries, government entities or other national entities with the power to create or change the way civic education is taught in principle. Furthermore, other entities, such as interest groups, may also be included or have some power in the process to influence the results. They make up the parties influencing and directly or indirectly guiding the creation and implementation of civics education in the curriculums. Therefore, it’s important to understand, if all of the parties involved understand the process, the goals and outcomes the same way, especially given the changing nature of civics education during the turbulent times the World is in (if and how has the ongoing wars have influenced the views to civics education, with emphasis on citizenship, of those participating in the wider policy creation on the topic). The central question the article is answering is the following: how is civic education governed in Estonia and Finland. The article comes to the conclusion that the policy level decisions are made by the ministry with the assistance of the implementation agency taking charge of the implementation-related aspects. The stakeholders involved are interested in having a say in the formulation of the civic education national curricula and attribute the setting of wider goals to the state level. However, it is also understood that due to the high degree of autonomy of the teachers, it cannot be stated that everyone understands the citizenship education universally the same, regardless of the policy creation process or the policy created. Also, the differences between the two countries approach to the policy creation is outlined.